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My good friend, Octave Debary — eminent anthropologist and writer — holding his new book, Retourner le monde (Creaphis Editions), which is already getting rave reviews, including in Le Monde!



A lovely message from Daniel David Wood, novelist and founder of small press Splice:
“I found myself more swept along by it [Loren Ipsum] than I expected to be… I went into it with expectations of intellectual rewards, which it certainly delivered, but was caught off-guard (and won over) by how spry and fleet-of-foot it was — I mean, it just moves so nicely, and has a tone that I hadn’t anticipated (somehow lighter and satirical, on a granular level, but with an edge, with bite). It put me often in mind of Perec, maybe an obvious comparison — not the Oulipian constraint of A Void, but in terms of narrative sweep and momentum.”

Philip Cu Unjieng reviews Loren Ipsum for the Manila Bulletin, the Philippines’ largest English language broadsheet, 10 January 2026.

“Loren Ipsum” by Andrew Gallix
An Anglo-French writer who teaches at the Sorbonne and edits the 3 AM magazine, Gallix gifts us this novel that’s playful, whimsical, and subversive in a literary manner. It’s satire and autobiography, it’s literary theory and crime fiction, and it’s a grand farce that also works as social commentary. And its specific target, the literary world and intelligentsia of Europe, with special emphasis on the French and English manifestations of that milieu of letters. The title refers to Loren Ipsum, an English journalist who moves to Paris to research the ‘underground’ counter-culture author Adam Wandle. There’s a nihilistic anti-literary terrorist group on the loose in France, and it would seem that Wandle is their guru, their ‘éminence grise.’ With writers being murdered, the French literary world, and those who visit, live in fear of this cabal of terrorists.
With the French Riviera and Paris as the primary locations, practically every page is filled with wordplay, puns, alliteration, double entendres, funny metaphors, and similes. It’s like being on a crash course in literary devices, or indulging in a game of ‘How many do you spot?’. Fluent in both languages, Gallix creates these literary ‘bon mots’ in both English and French. One chapter consists of short snippets of overheard conversation on a yacht, while one chapter is narrated by a pet cat. There are authors’ names that dropped like rain in a summer storm, and cagey remarks made about these living authors. It’s all done with a patina of humor and naughtiness, and then underneath, we discern how something more serious is also being said regarding this world of contemporary literature, and how it impacts the world at large – the grave responsibility it also has beyond entertainment.

Thanks to Ed Owen for this nice review on Instagram.
The title is catnip to anyone who has ever set anything in print. Brilliant, entertaining but occasionally exhausting book centered around a torrent of puns, non (bon?) sequiturs, distorted song lyrics and cliches broken apart and reassembled as jokes.
One section on a Hokusai print I checked on Wikipedia to see that sections had been pulled and used as dialogue. I don’t see this as plagiarism, more a meta-carnivalesque melting pot of ideas and language.
Loren is a journalist, attempting to write about a writer while a dadaist terrorist group executes writers all over France and London. But if you are looking for a traditionally comprehensible story, this is not for you.
It’s a thrilling ride that reminded me of Tibor Fischer, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Brautigan or Patricia Lockwood. It’s relentlessly funny, bursting with wordplay and jokes of syntax, homophones and Lou Reed lyrics. It’s refreshing, dazzling.
Also, an impossibility for AI to replicate. It’s too intricate and multi layered. And what a sleeve! A great start to the year.

I am really honoured that Toby Litt — a writer whose work I have greatly admired ever since Adventures in Capitalism was published in 1996 — has accepted to blurb the forthcoming reprint of my debut novel, Loren Ipsum:
“Word for word, pun for pun, and twist for twist, Loren Ipsum is the most inventive and entertaining novel I’ve read in years. This is writing and plotting with a deep sense of freedom and mischief, and God we need more of both”.

Thanks to writer and artist Sophie Parkin for describing Loren Ipsum as a “surreal highbrow rollercoaster”.
Thanks also to Sam Jordison of Galley Beggar Press for the shout-out:
“I also didn’t want to major on Andrew Gallix’s Loren Ipsum, since my delight at actually being – in a suitably roundabout way – featured in the story renders me unable to comment on it with any objectivity. But I’d love you to get hold of a copy of that too.”
Name the above author.